Jean Lave in the context of Communities of practice

A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger significantly expanded on this concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.A CoP can form around members' shared interests or goals. Through being part of a CoP, the members learn from each other and develop their identities.

CoP members can engage with one another in physical settings (for example, in a lunchroom at work, an office, a factory floor), but CoP members are not necessarily co-located. They can form a virtual community of practice (VCoP) where the CoP is primarily located in an online community such as a discussion board, newsgroup, or on a social networking service.

Étienne Charles Wenger (born 1952) is an educational theorist and practitioner, best known for his formulation (with Jean Lave) of the theory of situated cognition and his more recent work in the field of communities of practice.

Situated learning is a theory that explains an individual's acquisition of professional skills and includes research on apprenticeship into how legitimate peripheral participation leads to membership in a community of practice. Situated learning "takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs".

The theory is distinguished from alternative views of learning which define learning as the acquisition of propositional knowledge. Lave and Wenger situated learning in certain forms of social co-participation and instead of asking what kinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are involved, they focused on the kinds of social engagements that provide the proper context and facilitate learning.